Comment by tomalpha
7 months ago
I just searched within the (edit: iOS App Store) App Store app for
ublock origin lite
“ublock origin lite”
For the unquoted search, there are twelve different apps/items returned above it - you really have to scroll down to find it at number 13.
Even for the quoted search, it’s returned in fourth place.
More interestingly the second time I searched with quoted it’s in third place, and the third time of searching the sponsored items at the top is getting even more random.
It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications. At the very least a 100% substring match should be very visible in the result. If not at the top, then there should be sorting criteria, to make it appear at the top, so that one can sane-ify the search result, when it is not sane.
A good example for bad search is the windows start menu. If you just logged in and the system is still loading (whatever it is doing all that long...) and you press the super key and then start typing, it might be too slow to find things _locally on your disk_, and might start searching online. When you have developed an automatism and just continue typing and then hit enter/return key, you will get some online shit result shown in Edge or some Microsoft store shit, instead of simply launching your already installed app. A critical race right there in the start menu. It's baffling.
Recently, there was a reddit post about a KDE menu search thing just as silly. It would not prioritize the title/name of an app, but instead, after typing 3 or more characters, find a word in the description of a launcher/starter of other apps and show those first, even though the 3 chars or more are a perfect substring of the name of an app.
People reinvent simple search and make silly searches over and over again. One of the main criteria is, that a substring match must lead to being high in the results, if not the top result. Shorter wins vs longer, because the match has higher percentage of match with the full title/name. Beginning of the string matched? Higher in results. All very basic things, that shouldn't be difficult to implement.
It helps to realize that the search is less of a tool for you to find information and more of a tool to show you an ad targeted on your search query. That's why ads are the top results and the organic data you wanted is after the fold. You're asking an ad company for information, and you don't expect an ad as a result? They are only continuing to show the organic results to tease you into coming back..
The original comment was about Apple's App Store. I assume there are financial ways to get your App "featured" there or something like that but as far as I know, you can't financially take direct influence on whatever logic Apple uses to sort search results there. Yet, it can still be spectacularly difficult to find an App - even if you type in its exact name, as indicated by OP (can confirm from my experience).
If you have a theory about what Apple's motivation to actively serve such bad results could be, I'd be interested to hear it. I've always sort of assumed that the root cause for this is some combination of neglect on Apple's part and attempts at gaming the system by developers (I don't know much about developing for the App Store, but I presume there are forms of SEO-like activities that can be done in attempts to bump up your app).
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Is Apple really an ad company?
I think it's reasonable to expect better from them.
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The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too. It seems like it only searches within the past few days or something, if I try searching for something from a while back it never finds it. And they removed the feature to quickly scroll back to a date in the past, so the only way to dig up old texts is to manually scroll back in a conversation and hope you find it. It's absolutely ridiculous that the search is so bad when it's an app by Google of all companies.
> The search in Google Messages on Android is completely useless too.
It's literally all Google products. They've just simplified and contextualized and added other things over the years such that if you're not searching for something already above the fold then it won't show up.
When I was using Gmail I had an email with important information that I needed about once a year. I knew the exact subject and who it was from but it would never show up in search. It was my only starred email so I could find it on demand.
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That's funny because iMessage search works quite well if you can find it buried in the interface. I have a feeling Apple themselves forgot it exists and hasn't gotten around to 'modernizing' it with AI yet.
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It’s not mind boggling at all. It’s controlled by one entity that is not optimizing for good search, but rather its own financial gain.
What's the entity in question for KDE search?
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This should disable the start menu web search on Windows 11. It's one of the first .reg tweaks I apply to a new system:
Ok, this is too good. When I clicked on the App Store link, it opened the App Store and a "What's New" dialog popped up and the only thing highlighted was "Improved Search".
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications
Not really, if you understand how modern search algorithms work.
Pagerank[1] relies on link analysis -- you see who links to whom, and combine that with information on the traffic each site gets to suss out which sites are more likely to be sought out.
None of that data is available when you're searching through your local hard drive -- you have to use basic search operators like AND, OR, or use negation (Eg: "Star Wars -film" to find information on the space laser thing)
Unfortunately, we don't train folks on how to search anymore, so when "the algorithm" doesn't produce what they are looking for, folks have no ability to conduct their own search.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
It's sad there needs to be a third-party app for local Windows search, but it works . . .
I watched an elderly mathematics professor manually type a full URL into the windows search box, complete with "https", and I thought to myself "surely that won't work" and lo and behold...
You mean he searched for a URL and received something that was an exact match as his sole result? Sounds like the search worked perfectly.
What do you think should've happened? The search say "I know what you're searching for, but I refuse to help because your dumb ass should've typed this into a web browser address bar?"
This isn't 1995. Computers have access to the Internet, and there's no reason your computer's search bar should only search local.
Now, if he'd had a file with that as its name, and a text document with that URL, I would've expected those first. Maybe not at first. Depends on disk space allocated to indexing.
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Not to stick up for the search in the app store, but I don't think it is necessarily that straightforward, particularly where there is money to be made by gaming the ranking.
if there's a system; people will go out of their way to game it if there's potentially $$$ involved.
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That's what you get for letting megacorps get away with monopolistic and anti-competitive behavior.
cool story bruh
Tangent; put lists in alphabetical order! Or some other order which makes sense to the user in the context, like date, or priority. Something which is not unordered, coincidence, whatever the hashtable or nosql DB produced, order of creation when that isn't an important ordering in the domain, some internal or even visible GUID.
Worse if there's no filter, worse if it's a dropdown and there's no way to type the desired name, only look.
It's like Youtube adding a section of videos you've already watched and have nothing to do with your search, in search results.
In Apple's case we can safely assume it's intentionally like that to make the most money.
Its great for the app store if people mistakenly download the wrong app. They can increase the total downloads stats for more than one app that way. And it creates more "engagement' with the app store. They don't care that it's "forced" engagement
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Seriously, especially when the substring is in the title or filename. Google drive searching is infuriating for that. It will pull up barely related documents to my search term that has the word buried in the content, and not even show the file that has my search term verbatim in the filename or title. If there's one company I expect a really great search experience with, it's Google, and yet it's been this way for years and years...
It’s not mind boggling, it’s on purpose
>It is mind-boggling, how in this day and age search functions can still be soooo bad in so many places on the web and inside applications.
You mean to say that you think they just somehow forgot to optimize these fundamental things to work well? No.... If the search functionality provided by an otherwise highly capable, ultra-rich tech company is an utter piece of shit, it's intentional. The optimization is elsewhere, while the users are left stuck with a deformed excuse.
Anyone downvoting feel like instead explaining their reasoning? Or just how search can be such utter shit in certain contexts, despite often being developed by companies like Microsoft, Apple, and even fucking Google of all things?
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I just searched for uBlock. Top result is an ad for another ad blocker. Second result is an ad blocker called "Ublock", with "Origin" in its tags; a clear scam whose purpose is to leech off the reputation of uBlock Origin and trick people.
Apple's App Store is chock full of scams like this. It's not just bad search, it's a failure to enforce any kind of anti scam policy (combined with seemingly intentionally terrible search).
But god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app, because they will then reject your update.
> god forbid you have the word Android somewhere in your app
I literally have an app installed on my iPhone called “Android TV” (a remote to control android smart TVs, which I used to have years ago), and it says “Connect to Android TV” in giant header typeface on the app homescreen.
Searching for “Android” on app store brings up even more apps containing that word in the name and in the app, including third-party non-Google apps.
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Apple’s App Store makes so much revenue (mainly through the slightly more legit scams like gacha games, but plenty through weekly subscriptions for outright scam apps too) that there are many incentives for that team to never clean this up.
It’s a huge driver of what Apple pushes as the future of the company: services. It has been this way for more than a decade now: "What the hell is this????Remember our talking about finding bad apps with low ratings? Remember our talk bout becoming the 'Nordstroms' of stores in quality of service?“ - Phil Schiller in 2012 (https://www.imore.com/hilarious-phil-schiller-email-reveals-...)
Apple’s contempt for its customers is palpable these days.
It breaks my heart to see how far they’ve fallen.
I have not raised expectations since they deleted half of my music collection years ago. To this day they provide no way to export iMessage threads.
Some of us have been palpating it for decades.
The problem is that people like us use Homebrew (and tell our families to), so there’s little incentive to complain loudly about this issue. Browser extensions and the occasional one-off app are the only reasons to go there.
Why do people think a browser extension is safe to use?
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I've always wondered why attorneys do not see these situations as easy money. Corporations really do control the courts...
Apple is really bad at search, and on purpose. Welp, money before quality!
Nah I think they’re just bad at search, macOS Spotlight search has to be the most slow janky search I have ever used.
Which I find really sad because at one point OSX had search quality that was really satisfying. That was maybe twenty years ago for me.
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You haven’t used windows search recently I take it.
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They definitely are bad at search. When I type “safar” into iOS settings, it says “no results for “safar”” while it looks for the fucking built-in browser’s search page.
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I can never find my emails on Mac. Even worse if they're organized in folders. I just want a universal search: contains text, sort by age, I don't care about other filters....
This doesn't really make Apple look better, but a huge part of it is surely how recent the Ublock Origin app for iOS is. New apps take time to propagate and become good responses. Which makes sense, you wouldn't want someone else to be able to instantly cover Ublock Origin itself with a copycat app (not that it doesn't happen anyway).
Seems like the copycat issue happens regardless: https://blog.lastpass.com/posts/warning-fraudulent-app-imper...
Search is bad everywhere these days.
Honestly, even Google search with "terms reddit" is better than Reddit's own built-in search. That says a lot.
Same deal on may mac. Unless I know the exact file name, Finder search is useless. Spotlight will happily surface a PDF from 2017 before showing the text file you saved yesterday.
Which brings me to the question: why is search so hard?
I tried on the mac store.
For the unquoted search, it now comes in 7th for me.
If I just search for ublock, I don't see it at all.
The mac store has long been bad, but this seems worse.
Why use an app store. Is Apple more trustworthy than the author of this app. Think about it
The company continues to increase its advertising services revenue. In terms of protecting computer buyers from advertising and associated surveillance, one could reason that its interests are conflicted
App store "search" has always been a joke. It has never been suitable for app "discovery". The company would rather computer owners select from lists of recommended apps
I don’t even see uBO Lite in the iOS App Store. I scrolled pretty far, too.
Working fine for me-- when I search under Mac Apps for "ublock origin lite" (no quotes), it appears in 1st place.
For me, searching for "uBlock origin lite" (without the quotes) puts it in 3rd place; below AdBlock Pro and an ad for trip(dot)com.
When I search "uBlock origin" it doesn't seem to show up at all.
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I too get the same for Mac apps, but for iOS apps still see the same competitor results returned first. For me, that's the same whether I use the App Store from my phone, or laptop.
I needed to add search to my own website. I wanted it to be local search (the titles for the documents are all available locally). I tried several different popular 1000s of stars JavaScript search libraries. All but one failed on simple searches. Like if the title was "See Spot Run to the Park" and my search was "Park" or "Run" this title would not be listed as a result and titles with neither word would appear. I reported the issues, they were ignored as "working as intended". Not sure why anyone uses these libraries. I suspect they don't actually test. The plug them in, it appears to work at a glance, and they ship it.
I'm talking about Fuse.js, FlexSearch.js, etc.... I don't remember which other ones I tried but was shocked out bad the results were
Have you tried Pagefind?
https://github.com/Pagefind/pagefind
https://pagefind.app/
no. At a glance it appears to be create an index at site build time. That's not what I needed. I needed to search user document titles (different for every user). Those document titles are synced to local storage. So not a build time thing
I get shown a fucking ad for Google Chrome when searching for “ublock origin lite” in the iOS app store.
Same. It never used to show them. It only started recently. But it's only partially letting some ads through. Youtube video ads are still blocked which is good.
Apple is generally bad at search. For further evidence, see their developer website. To get anything useful out of it, I have to use a custom Google search: https://www.google.com/search?num=100&udm=14&q=site%3Adevelo...
Some commenters are presenting a conspiracy theory about how Apple is intentionally sabotaging App Store search, perhaps with the goal of maximizing App Store search ad revenue. I think the empirical evidence, covering all examples of Apple search, points to incompetence rather than malice. Money does factor in, but again, not in a conspiratorial way: rather, Apple simply has no monetary incentive to fix their own incompetence. It's complacency rather than conspiracy. This is what happens with monopolies and duopolies: they've already got essentially a captive audience, so they no longer need to put in the effort to compete. They just "phone it in", so to speak.
I don't think that Apple wants a bunch of scams in the App Store. But when developers and users are practically throwing money at Apple, no matter what Apple does or doesn't do, and "services" margins are 70%, there's a great temptation to pocket the profits and shrug.
For another example of how Apple is bad at search, look at the Settings app. Awful. But again, it's not sabotage. That would be silly and pointless. It's just pure and simple incompetence and complacency.
I agree fully about how they have proven their incompetence, but let’s imagine you are a PM there and you pitch a feature “Fixing App Store search using well-known strategies and techniques”
I can’t imagine that especially Tim Cook’s Apple is naive enough to not realize that’s going to dent ad revenue, since most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws. So it seems like that project won’t be approved because your boss and their boss are going to know that you’ll be losing Apple a ton of sweet, sweet pure-profit revenue if you succeed. If it would make Apple 100 million dollars in profits to fix it, especially for a neatly encapsulated problem like App Store, where it wouldn’t be that disruptive to just rip and replace the search engine, Apple would just fix it.
All the Mac and iPhone search incompetence, it’d be revenue neutral to fix, and not lend itself to flashy advertising like “liquid glass” does, so that’s why that’ll never happen.
> most developers have to buy ads directly because of the current flaws.
I wouldn't say it's because of the flaws. It's because of the design: regardless of how well search works, the top hit is always an ad. At best, even with search working perfectly, a search for your own app would return your app as the #2 hit at highest. The search ad system still incentivizes developers to buy ads for searches of their own app, if only as a defensive measure to prevent other developers from inserting their apps at the #1 spot. And Apple makes money, and you pay money, if App Store users click on your own ad for your own app at the #1 spot rather than the "free" search result at the #2 spot.
Oh yeah, and you can't block App Store search ads with an ad blocker. Consider how the App Store is entirely native and has no web-based purchases or downloads.
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Apple Podcast search never fails to enrage me. There's no way to search within a specific show, just all your followed shows at once. Even if you know the exact episode title, if it has common words in it, you'll get a stream of garbage. It treats any match in the episode description with the same weight as an exact match of the episode title. So I have to go on the web, search the specific podcast to figure out the date, then just scroll to it in Apple Podcasts.
App Store search takes a while to surface exact-name searches for newly released apps. No idea why.
Does anyone have the canonical link and care to share?
With just
ublock origin lite
I get it in position 1 one (after one unrelated ad).
doesn't seem to be available in the Dutch app-store.